Elbow Room:
The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting

Daniel C. Dennett

I think anything by Daniel Dennett is worth reading. It could be argued
that this is because I find his ideas congenial, but in fact the
causality is the other way around: many of my philosophical ideas were
formed by reading his books. The reasons I recommend his works are the
same ones that attracted me to them in the first place: clarity of
language and conceptualisation, preparedness to state opposing positions
with their full force and familiarity with and understanding of the
natural sciences. Elbow Room is vintage Dennett.

Dennett's basic thesis is that most of the fuss about free will has been
caused by the summoning of bogeymen — non-existent and sometimes barely
credible powers that are supposed to be able to interfere with our free
will in a deterministic universe. The opening chapter, "Please Don't
Feed the Bugbears", looks at some of these bogeymen, and discusses the
more general use of "intuition pumps" (stories that appeal to our human
level intuition to prejudice us for or against more technical ideas).
The following chapters lay the groundwork for understanding different
conceptions of free will: the second discusses "reason", the third
"control" and "self control" and the fourth "self" and ideas of
"self-made selves". These concepts are set within an evolutionary
context.

The next chapter, "Acting Under the Idea of Freedom", looks at how we
can continue deliberating while believing that the universe is
deterministic. In particular it considers different definitions of
"opportunity" and "avoidable", and how these things tie in with real
life deliberations, motivations and expectations. The chapter "Could
Have Done Otherwise" finally takes the lid completely off the
metaphysical "can" of worms (Dennett is fond of the occasional pun).
Retrospective desires to change the past, wanting to be able to make
several incompatible choices at once, confusion about the difference
between the actual and the possible, the role of chaos in physics —
these are just a few of the things considered.

The final chapter looks at what Dennett considers the most important
question — Why do we want free will anyway? Dennett thinks that the
fears raised by hard determinists and incompatibilists are about kinds
of free will which aren't really worth wanting anyway (when they are not
simply self-contradictory). Before getting worked up considering the
details of their arguments we should consider whether we really care
about what is at stake.

For anyone concerned with arguments over "free will" Elbow Room
will be essential reading. (It is also suitable as an introduction to
the topic.) Elbow Room may also be of interest to a wider audience;
even if you are uninterested in or bored by the metaphysical "Problem of
Free Will", you may find Dennett's ideas on such topics as rationality,
selfhood and personal identity thought-provoking. (If that is the case
you should also have a look at his more recent Consciousness Explained.)